Can a really good support or tank carry a team at any rank?

People fail to understand that some dps heroes in the right hands can carry due to how effective they are on their own.

Maybe it’s possible to carry with heroes like zarya or zen sometimes, but it’s clearly way easier and more consistent to carry with specific dps heroes that can do work on their own and don’t need to rely on the rest of the team.

Your video is a perfect example that showcases this.

How many smurfs that carry in lower ranks do we see playing healer or tank doing so?
Most of the time it’s a dps hero that destroys everything.

2 Likes

jjonak plays zen and esp ana like a dps. Was wartching him play ana yest and he was basically a reaper even though he was against top 500’s.

I don’t know about carry but you can win >50% of games with mercy at low ELO. I was able to get out of bronze playing mostly mercy / moira (heavily mercy before valk nerf).

Damage focus for bronze players is very poor. If you triage correctly you can make it so that no one on your team dies in the engagements at least until an ulti is dropped.

Also since no one really groups up a lot of the time, if you use your GA mobility to pocket your DPS during their 1v1s so that they win >50% of the skirmishes, that can snowball into payload distance / capture %. It also prevents them from feeding.

If you are able to identify if you have a better than average DPS or Tank you can just hard pocket them for most of the game and win.

I think a mistake a lot of the mercy players at that ELO make is sticking to the tank line. If the team isn’t grouped up or playing around the main tank a lot of the time you will be standing behind the shield doing nothing, providing no value. The quality of play (aim etc…) makes it harder/take longer to punish an out of position DPS so it isn’t as unsafe to go around with them as you might think.

Not much you can do if your team is entirely potato but if they are relatively even with the opponent you can definitely push the game in your favour as support. Sometimes you are the only one on the team with a card after the win and its for 50%+ kill participation on defensive assists.

1 Like

You can carry with any character if you are a good shotcaller up to your elo. Shotcalling is especially easier on mechanically less demanding heroes.

I’ve asked this question in a post before. Basically the answers boil down to:
Yes. But use mainly zen or Ana. Essentially dps/tech your way out, but mostly dps your way out while healing a bit on the side, which I find that you might as well start to play dps since they have so many “get out of jail free” skills.

1 Like

Of course, then you get a team that goes 4 dps and zen, while the 4 dps can’t manage to do more damage than the tank sooo… =/
[Tank Carry](https://xboxdvr.com/gamer/tastemehsquanch/screenshot/10529452)
half those deaths even were just from being way too overly aggro.

(I can post videos but not links/pictures, I don’t get it >.>)

A few things wrong here.

  1. That isn’t a 1v6… That’s a 6v6 with a GM Smurf carrying sub-bronzes.
  2. I said, there will be carrying moments , plays, and periods… But 1 person cannot start up a match vs 6 people of an equal or similar rank from the beginning, and win…
  3. There was really nothing exceptional about that footage… Just regular clips of a Smurf doing well, but far from doing it by himself, as he has 5 other teammates… And even when he loses one, the other team also has a leaver… And he still struggled to get it done… He had a hard-fought match against a bunch of sub-bronzes…and he’s supposed to be Top 500.

So you indirectly proved point… Even one of the greatest players in world will face difficulty and adversity… WITH A TEAM , even against people who are below bronze, which means exactly what I said, without a decent level of assistance, winning isn’t possible…

Show me a 1v6 MATCH… Not 90 seconds from a 25 minute video.

1 Like

So, accepting your premise that he wasn’t carrying, when this was about as pure a carry you could hope to see - then presumably no role can carry.

What is carry anyway? I’d argue it’s when one player is so much more skilled than his team that he is able to lift his team to a win. That if he was replaced his team would lose.

On that basis even a Mercy of a higher skill can carry.

The more salient question is then, presumably, which are the best carry heroes? Which have the most impact when wielded by a higher skilled player?

This is relative to your team mates. I’m sure that in diamond plus a Reinhardt can absolutely carry as his dps use his space, etc. But at low ELo you’re lucky if people even stand behind your shield.
I’ve seen games where the Rein has advanced forwards, got to the point with me behind him, whilst our 4 elite instalock dps have all gone a totally different route and been butchered in a 4v6 against the entire enemy team that used elite “grouping together” tech to win.

The match video was with “sub bronze” team mates as you all them. In that game he had to go full on dps in order to “carry” that game.

Back to the original question. If at low ELo you need to frag out to win, that leaves DVa and Zen as two obvious candidates for carrying at low ELO, just because they can make up the gap caused by the likely sub par dps on their team.

TLDR: Tanks and Support can carry at all ELOs, but only certain frag heavy heroes can carry best at low ELO.

I wasn’t arguing that it’s impossible to carry. I said no one can carry in their own rank, and no one can carry for the duration of a match.

I also said a win is a group effort. And until someone shows me a video of a 1v6 match with equally skilled players, my position is that you can’t do it alone.

And if you can’t do it alone, how much of a carry was it really?

Solo carry doesn’t exist, period. You can outperform your team, or carry 1 or 2 people who are struggling, but you need most of your team to do their job, otherwise you’ll lose, no matter who you are.

If you’re the only person doing anything in your team, and the other team is trying just a little, carrying is simply not possible.

I specifically said the caveat being a GM level player smurfing with silvers and bronzes… then he posts a video of just that… a Top 500 smurfing BELOW bronze. When you consider that, there’s really nothing impressive about that gameplay.

Again, anyone can shine in moments. But try carrying a match against people equally skilled to you.

But surely the point of carrying is that by definition you are better than your team mates? When you carry you are the uber player lifting your inept team up by the scruffs of their necks.

The concept of carry comes from players seeing inept team mates and thinking that they can do better.

Then players realise that fragging out swings games the best and you get all your instalock dps in low ELO games…

I like how you said ‘sub bronzes’ multiple times, probably to make yourself feel better about your rank, but those people were low plat lol. Still terrible but not bronze terrible.

1 Like

By definition carrying is compensating for one of more teammates who aren’t able to do their share

Simply playing better than your team isn’t carrying… Unless someone isn’t doing their part, and you’re compensating for them.

What people fail to realize is that just because you outplay your team, doesn’t mean they weren’t doing well, or at least their part.

And so long as they did their part, they weren’t carried, regardless of how well one individual does… Because 1 person can’t carry 5, unless they’re sub-bronze Smurfing.

If someone is underperforming, you can pick up the slack and carry that 1 person. But

Actually everyone was in silver… He had two golds on his team that dropped into silver, and everyone on the other team was either silver or doing their placements. And

I even looked up everyone he was playing with… of those that had public profiles, all were in silver and gold… And that’s after more than 4 months.

There wasn’t a single Plat in the entire game.

So even if they weren’t sub-bronze, they were all floating around mid to high-silver… And he’s a top 500-level player… And when you consider that, that footage is not really that impressive.

At that level, it’s no different then if he had played with bots on hard. I’m not trying to be insulting, I’m just saying that there’s nothing impressive when the captain of the high school basketball team dunks on a bunch of first-graders. And there’s nothing cool about that… That’s why those “unranked to top 500” runs are just stupid

No. only if you are gm and smurfing since you cant rly kill with support only ana but to kill with ana is also pretty hard to do while trying to heal your team at the same time

60% of 2000 SR is 1200 SR >.>

You can carry your team if you are a good Ana healer. I typically get 10,000 or higher healing with Ana but usually get up to 17,000 heals with Ana.

The best part is tell your team to stay together to benefit from the nade and heals. I may see more than half my team on the brink of death and then a simple nade and some shots and 3 or 4 of them are fully healed as if they are not taking any damage.

I can also sleep just about any ULT and counter attack with sleep.

Then using a Nano at the right time can win most team fights.

You can also use Anti-nade to kill off Roadhog or other enemies who need heals cause they are low health and it lasts long enough that you can shoot them yourself or alert your team to finish them off.

yeah this is absolute nonsense. i carry like 80% if you put my lucio in low plat on my lucio account, and I am only 2900 high with him. Sup carry fine. Mercy is the only one with a struggle to carry, and that’s mostly below plat. after plat the difference between a high level mercy and a low level one means quite a bit

That’s literally impossible because he won his first placement and the one linked was the 2nd match. Fresh accounts always start their first placements at high gold/low plat. He did have two silvers in the enemy team on his first game but that’s because they were in a 3 stack with an unranked smurf that was probably around high plat. You gotta lose your first 4 placements to be in a silver mmr game.

Cite your sources, because I’ve been following this game since alpha, and blizzard has never gone on record and explain exactly how placements work, or how MMR works, or how it’s calculated, so you are making an assumption based off of conjecture with no real proof

You should check this thread

Every alt I’ve made started in that range even when I was playing diamonds+ in QP. You can check neptuno’s latest smurf where he placed master after going 10-0, his first game was with high golds Twitch
And just like him there are tons of other pros who have streamed placements on lvl 25 accounts and they all started there. This is why with some luck some hardstuck bronze/silvers place their alts much higher than their mains, you just need to go 5-5 to place around plat. They always derank all the way down to their original rank after they’ve played enough tho…

1 Like